I often delve into the mind of people who act in devious and wrongful ways.
In the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, author Dale Carnegie describes the mind of a bank robber and murderer named Two-Gun Crowley.
Holed up after being caught in a heist, Crowley wrote a note to explain himself while he faced certain death from the law enforcement officers outside.
Crowley wrote that he only ever wanted to do the right thing. Crowley saw himself as the good guy.
And he was a murderer!
Now let’s consider a low level reported scammer in our modern digital society.
Far removed from their victims, preying on people online.
What do they think of themselves?
In the news lately is Scott Levy, the owner of Fuel Online, ostensibly an SEO corporation.
Levy is in hot water after being credibly accused of running several variations of scams for retweets.
More interesting to me than the scams Levy may have been running is how he sees himself.
Let’s have a look.
“Blowing out someone else’s Candle doesn’t make yours any brighter.”
This is an enlightening statement Levy made – before proceeding to apparently threaten the President of the United States with a smear campaign if he did not retweet Levy!
In another public statement, Scott Levy said that a giveaway which is just a scam to get retweets would be “fraud.”
And yet, Scott Levy has been reported as doing exactly that!
This is a fantastic statement, which likely reveals a known psychological truism – that a guilty individual typically will state that which they are guilty of at some point in time.
Typically this is done through projection.
While there is much of modern armchair psychology that should be thrown in the trash, the idea of psychological projection of one’s negative traits on to others should not be discounted.
In the case of a low level Twitter scammer like Scott Levy, projection appears to be one of the first tools used in the event of a dispute.
Looking into the “magic mirror” as it’s said, is what happens when someone with negativity in his heart takes to Twitter with an axe to grind.
If Scott Levy is truly the scam artist that others are reporting him to be, this is a classic case study in the mind of a scammer.
